When a private-pilot applicant around here can’t scare up another examiner and is desperate enough to call me for a practical test, I tell him (for me, that means male, female or unknown) to plan a flight any place he wants to go … well, someplace that’s at least a couple of hundred miles away. I hope he chooses a destination he might actually want to go to when he’s licensed … like for a golf weekend or to visit the grandkids or to enjoy deliciously wicked trysts with a friend (female, male or unknown).
Since he probably learned to fly at an airport with at least one long, hard-surface runway, it’s unlikely he’s ever looked at the charts and computed his takeoff distance “for real”; that’s something you do for the written exam. Being a couple of hundred pounds overweight is illegal but not particularly unsafe with 6,000 feet of concrete ahead of you. And getting the single-engine Cessna or Piper he’s been flying out of CG limits is remote unless the fuel tanks are full and he and his instructor are the size of sumo wrestlers. So he’s been programmed to fill ‘er up, or at least fill “to the tabs,” before every flight.
